


home

by literarygirl



Category: Dangan Ronpa, Super Dangan Ronpa 2
Genre: Gen, SDR2 Spoilers, ending spoilers, seriously the entire story is a spoiler
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-05
Updated: 2013-11-05
Packaged: 2017-12-31 13:46:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,082
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1032394
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/literarygirl/pseuds/literarygirl
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He's got to go home someday. Whether or not he's ready to go home is another matter entirely.</p>
            </blockquote>





	home

**Author's Note:**

> An early birthday gift for a friend. Not enough Teruteru fics in the world, y'know?  
> (I've written this fic assuming the Dangan Island general ending, but it works just as well as a post-game everyone wakes up scenario too.)

Humanity has come a long way, but the trains still don’t go as far as Teruteru needs them to. He rides the lines as far as they will go, alternating between staring out the window and staring at his hands when the landscape became too painful to look at. He always keeps his head down.

When at last he reaches as far as he can go, he walks with heavy steps and eyes wide open. When he woke up he found an old butcher’s knife somewhere where his belongings had been stashed, wrapped carefully in his mother’s even older chef’s scarf, and it sits at the ready in the old satchel he’d managed to procure for himself. Every once in a while he feels it as it bumps against his side. Teruteru tries not to think about it too hard.

The trip on foot is uneventful. Sometimes he’ll come across what were once old buildings and if he’s unlucky he’ll come across a forgotten skeleton or a few bones.

He watched two crows pick apart what might have been a cat for a split second before turning away and almost retching.

Mostly, there is silence.

There is no sign to indicate that he has stepped foot into his hometown, but he instinctively knows. He stands still, and looks left, then right warily. No one comes to greet him. There is no mob waiting for his head, like he had dreamed of, once. As far as he knows, no one even knew he was alive or where he had disappeared to years ago.

(Teruteru supposes he should be considerate and count his blessings- he was not a key member of Despair, nor was he a particularly recognizable one. His talent was cooking, not something that was easily twisted to hurt others. He was a cook. He was a chef. He still is a chef.)

As far as humanity has come, his town is small and still broken and no one has tried to fix it yet.

His legs move on instinct, walking down abandoned streets and across the remains of empty lots. He knows the address by heart, and doesn’t give a second thought to his sense of direction. Even in this warped, desolate version of his town with the wind howling loudly through broken windows he can find his way home.

For a brief moment, Teruteru imagines the red roof and white walls of his home. There’s a warm summer breeze, and the windows are open. He hears cicadas and smells his mother’s cooking. The sound of light chatter follows the smells outside- the restaurant was rarely ever packed, but that was all right, because it was always, always welcoming. It was home.

The restaurant’s front door is gone. The windows are broken. The wooden frame looks like it will give way with the slightest breeze.

Teruteru feels like he might cry or scream, might do something, but he squeezes his eyes shut and clenches his fists until they hurt; takes shaky deep breathes (and coughs up the dirty air) until he can finally find it in himself to walk through the threshold.

If he tries, he can still picture where everything was. He does try, but feels sick to his stomach as soon as he does. So, as he walks through the ruins of his home, he tries to imagine it new.

He imagines dark tables with crisp white tablecloths; and a bar, maybe, with sleek countertops and a polished frame. Stainless steel, top-of-the-line appliances in the kitchen and chic lighting all around and large windows, to show the outside world the elegance of his eatery-

He stops at what was once the door to the kitchen. He can see rusty hinges built into what was left of the frame.

No. Something doesn’t feel right.

He tries again, this time imagining a lighter atmosphere. He still wants his crisp tablecloths, but with lighter tables. Round tables and seats with comfy red cushions. A modernized kitchen, still stainless steel, but with a half-wall, to see his hard work coming to fruition- his mother always said that seeing the cook working made things feel like home.

She was right.

Something crunches under his feet and makes him wince. He lifts his foot away and sees broken glass and a broken frame hiding a worn picture. Carefully, with shaking hands, he bends down to pick it up.

He remembers this photo. It’s him, him and his mother. She’s so young and healthy, and he is barely a year old. He used to be embarrassed that she kept it on a shelf in the kitchen for anyone who walked in to see.

She looks so cheerful, so proud of her little boy.

A wet smudge falls on the picture silently. There’s a large lump in his throat that Teruteru can’t swallow. The smell of dead wood and poison air makes him choke as he tries to take more deep breaths, and the knife inside the satchel bumps against his side once more and makes him feel sicker. He wipes across his face with his sleeve.

They all died before the world went to despair; his siblings and mother gone before he could ever get home. 

He never got the chance to say goodbye.

Minutes pass before he can collect himself to look at the photograph again. It wrinkles in his tight grip and his hands are shaking. But he forces himself to look at his mother’s smile again.

This is why he is here now, he reminds himself. He’s here to pick up the pieces and try again, like his mother always taught him to. It’s inevitable that he’ll have to stare down despair, again. He cannot run away from that truth. But there is hope to be found somewhere in his memories, and a dream that has carried him this far to see through.

When he steps out of the remains of his restaurant, he carefully slides the photograph in his hand inside his satchel, crouches down and carefully picks through piles of wood near the entrance. It is a fruitless search, at first; it takes him around the perimeter of debris until he finds what he’s looking for when he is about to give up.

It’s very old, and missing several chunks, but the wooden plague that reads “Hanamura Restaurant” is still there. He clears a place next to the doorway and leans it against the wall.

“I’m home, Mom,” he finally whispers.


End file.
